In this blog, I want to try to concentrate also on productivity and how to have a more relaxing / stress-free life. As someone with manic depression, I have to watch my stress levels very carefully so I am always on the lookout for ways to stay calm, ways to have a really great day and so on. I am also reading some productivity blogs such as Zen Habits which I am already totally addicted to. Thanks Aibek for recommending that one to me.

One of the ways that I am trying to be productive and organised is in my online life. Last week, I deleted 75% of my website, and I also deleted 3000 emails from my Gmail account which was actually very liberating (Gmail is so fast now, it feels as if it is on steroids!). I unsubscribed from about 15 different email newsletters, set up filters to send the crap straight to the email trash bin, and today I decided to uninstall Google Talk and only check my email no more than once a hour.

Being honest with myself, Google Talk was a serious impediment to my productivity. With its new mail notification feature, it was disturbing me constantly with its pop-up window and it was chaining me to my email all day. Now with it gone, and my determination to check email only sporadically throughout the day, I feel I can now concentrate on more important tasks - such as things that bring in money - REAL WORK! ;-)

Now I just have to tackle my huge RSS reading list! At 200+ feeds, that will take some serious pruning......

Despite the fact that it has a nasty habit of slowing down my PC to the point that the CPU is at 100%, I am nevertheless starting to become a fan of Google Desktop's sidebar feature. This comes as a big relief to me as I was looking for some kind of desktop widget and I had finally run out of patience with Yahoo Widgets which was malfunctioning on a regular basis.

There are two apps which I have on my desktop sidebar which are rapidly proving invaluable to me in my quest to be more productive with my time. One is a notepad which I am using to jot down random tasks / thoughts. Up until a couple of weeks ago, I was using Todoist and that worked well enough. It even had a Gmail integration and an iGoogle module. But the reason I ultimately gave it up was the fact that I had to open an internet browser to use it. Sometimes if I am running another program, I first shut down all non-essential programs, including internet browsers. So if an idea comes to me that needs to be noted down, I want to be able to note it immediately. Not wait until the current task is finished and hope that I then remember to open Firefox then Gmail then write whatever I was thinking up to a hour before. So having a notepad on the desktop is extremely useful.

The other app that is rapidly proving its weight in gold is the ability to access my Google Calendar also without having to open my Firefox browser. I can add appointments via the Google Desktop "Quick Add" function and view my appointments on any day I choose, with the aid of a very cool looking pop-out window. The only downside to this feature is that I can't delete appointments from my Google Calendar using Google Desktop. For that, I have to open the browser and do it directly on the calendar website. I hope that Google offers a delete function in the future for users of the calendar app on Desktop.

Now what would be really good would be a Gmail module where you can send emails from the desktop without opening a browser. You can already view your emails on Google Desktop but the whole module is in a real mess. Old emails come first with new emails at the bottom (when ideally it should be the other way around) and emails that I normally have sent straight to archive appear in the desktop module with no apparent way to make them disappear. Can somebody please make a much better Gmail module for Google Desktop? I promise I'll be your pal forever!

One of my immediate go-to sites each day is Google News and I always keep it open in a Firefox tab, letting it manually update itself every 15 minutes or so. But being an information junkie and a researcher (hence my nickname, "Mr Google"), there are specific news topics that I like to constantly keep tabs on and it would normally take up so much time in my day to manually check out each search term in Google News. Hence Google News's RSS feed capability is an absolute lifesaver and it is a cinch to set up.


Basically first enter the search term in Google News. For this example, I am using "Putin" (as I do a lot of research on Russia and Russian politics) :